Dear Editor,

As our education minister battles to get our children doing better in mathematics, I would love for more emphasis to be placed on the foundation of African thoughts in the sciences and the philosophy.

Take a book like Civilization or Barbarism’ by Cheikh Anta Diop, which states: “The Rhind Papyrus shows that the Egyptians were the inventors of arithmetic and geometric progressions. Now, the most famous ‘supposed’ discoveries of Pythagoras deal with diverse operations in the arithmetic and geometric series.”

For decades we have been teaching our children that Pythagoras discovered these mathematical formulas, when this is not true. Our Papyrus scrolls and the inscriptions in the pyramids of East Africa, clearly shows that many of these theorems were written hundreds of years before Pythagoras was even born.

Another book which should be a text in our High Schools is An Introduction to African Civilizations by Willis Hoggins and John Jackson. This book shows that Al Kharizmi, a black man, introduce the zero as a mathematical quantity in the ninth century. The (black) Moslem Mathematicians added Algebra and plane and spherical trigonometry to the Euclidean geometry.

The (black) mathematician, Mohammed Ben Musa, substituted sines for chords in trigonometry, and in algebra, devised a method for solving quadratic equations.

Maybe, if we start teaching our children, that we the black people invented many of these Mathematical formulas and principles, and that the DNA of those inventors runs through our veins, then our children may return to a natural love for Mathematics and attain dazzling heights.

Thereafter, not only will we learn to apply the principles in our daily lives, as the Africans did, but add to, and develop on them.

Miguel Lorne

East Street

Kingston